I always wanted to be an artist. Most of my cousins have a specific art. They can draw, paint, cake decorate…all of these things in both traditional art and nontraditional art. I never had any of those skills. I could write but even that was highly cerebral and didn’t produce a physical item.
Doing ceramics has done more then just teach me how to throw on the wheel. Its taught me some really powerful lessons. These may seem simple but they have reshaped my awareness of the world and my place in it
Everything in your life is art.
Art isn’t just confined to what we think of as art. It’s not just drawing or paintings. It’s not even just vases or needlepoint. It’s the mug you drink your tea or coffee out of. It’s the teapot that your grandmother has with a mark from the 1940’s. It’s the way that a handle fits into your hand. It’s the knife that a maker has lovingly forged.
Doing ceramics is something that has taught me to really look at the little everyday things in life and appreciate them in a totally different way.
There isn’t a day that goes by now that I don’t see something beautiful in my everyday life. Making isn’t just about making art in museums. The act of making and using what we make, makes us human.
Worth is based on thoughtfulness and effort.
Ceramics is about patience. When people ask me how long it takes to make something, I don’t actually know because there is so much waiting and watching and taking my time. It takes lots of stop and go and putting it to the side and coming back to it. Once I realized this, I started realizing how long it takes to make every single thing that we use. Someone made that. Someone had to think about it and plan it. Someone put their minds to it.
It really gave me an entirely new prospective and made me realize that when something is cheap, it’s because the thoughts and effort that went into it probably wasn’t the same as something more expensive.
The care that people put into things when making them matters and makes the item matter even more. The ability of humans to create and think of genuinous ways to make what we need and want is an act as old as time and as new as the internet.
So when you see someone on line sewing or making a pot or planting a garden, don’t think that this is a fade or they are following a trend. Making is not a trend. It’s a heart felt effort that’s driven by desire and passion.
Self-reliance and Community reliance
There is nothing stranger to me now then the reminder that for most of human existence, everything that we used in our lives was made by our own two hands. Of course, we know this intellectually but I don’t think that we think about it as often as we should. The ability to go to target or have things shipped in two days from amazon wasn’t a thing. If we wanted something we had to know how to make it or know someone who knew how to make it. It connected us to other people in our communities that had different skill sets then we did.
This ability to make and fix our things has somehow slipped away from us and I can’t help but wonder if it diminished our reliance on our networks too. When we get things from other people in our communities we are supporting each other. I know that when I go to a local, they know me and that when I buy things from there, I am one of the reasons they can make it. And I know that they will support me right back in some way. This is how communities have worked since the beginning of time. It is only in the past 200 years (Mostly even less) that we have abandon that model. In doing so, community and our ability to relate and rely on echother has also fallen to the way side.
Making and knowing how to care for my equipment has made me appreciate it even more and the effort that everyday items take. The people who can make different things from me blow my mind. I have build such a community in my borough because of the makers and small businesses that bind us together. It is such a wild feeling that I can’t say I have experienced before.
Mistakes and Failure are part of the Process
This is something that I still struggle with as I think that many of us do. In my personal, antidotal experience, the people that get into arts in their adult lives tend to be type A people. We want to do things right. We want to learn. It comes with the territory. But Ceramics doesn’t care about our personality type.
Sometimes that clay will fall. Sometimes we will dry something for over a month and it will still explode. Glaze runs or comes out uneven. Many times, most of all when you’re starting, those ideas in your head are hard to actually bring into physical form.
Failure is part of the process though. Even the best potters I know will make eight plates when they need six. When I learned you could reuse clay, it took so much pressure off. Giving myself the freedom to make mistakes actually gave me more confidence to try things and be different than being perfect ever did.
How interconnected everything is
When I started Pottery, I didn’t realize that in my head I already knew so much about it. I already had beautiful pieces from around the world in my home and didn’t know it. The gifts people had gotten me, vases, tea pots, bowls are from every culture. In college, I was an anthropology major, and we were looking at pottery all of the time.
Pottery is a medium that has be found in every dig site, every culture, and every part of the world. There are no exceptions that I know of. When you pick up a piece of pottery, you are touching the finger groves of someone from hundreds, even thousands of years ago.
We are all connected through this art and practice. We had all used it. We have all touched mud and sand and made something out of it. In a world that is always talking about division, about how different we are all are, in this we are the same beautiful mess of mud, water, fire and earth.
That realization hits me every single time. It invigorates me and touches my heart how connected we all are and we don’t even know it on a daily level.